


you weren't invited and don't want to stay

by principessa



Series: all you have is an axe to grind [4]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Chasind Hawke, Gen, Kirkwall (Dragon Age), Mercenaries, Red Hawke, Red Iron (Dragon Age), Sibling Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-13
Updated: 2017-12-13
Packaged: 2019-02-14 10:27:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13005813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/principessa/pseuds/principessa
Summary: 'Most members and allies of the Red Iron use codenames, or something like them: Worthy, Elegant, Tomwise. Adjectives seem to be the order of the day, but their surname fits well enough.'The sisters Hawke settle into the Red Iron. Set between the Prologue and Act 1.





	you weren't invited and don't want to stay

Kirkwall is called the City of Chains, which is fitting – within their first week of arriving, Hawke and Bethany are chained to Meeran and his men, owing someone their lives for a year entire in exchange to entrance to the city. They are chained by Mother’s childhood memories, remembering a noble youth that she locked away when she ran away with a Chasind apostate. They are chained by their familial obligation to Gamlen: he was never there, never knew them. Hawke doesn’t know the man, but he is of their blood and he took them in, so she supposes he is hers now, remembers Father smearing blood across the bridge of her nose and barking _We don’t abandon our blood, girl._

The city is as dismal as they thought it would be. Built of black stone that sucks in light and heat, the streets like labyrinths, curling in and twisting for no understandable reason. Hawke wonders what it would look like from the sky. He leads them onto a crowded ferry, away from the mage-hanging Gallows into the City of Chains proper. The docks are overcrowded with refugees and beggars and foul-mouthed dock workers, like a nightmarish version of when they lived in Amaranthine for a few years. Gamlen leads them up innumerable staircases, through what look like mine shafts at time. Kirkwall was carved into the face of the very cliffs, by magic, some say. Hawke has heard tell that it was a city of slaves, once. The idea of her mother and sister living here sets her skin crawling worse than it has since before Ostagar, her blood boiling to think that they survived everything, that she outlived her father and her brother, for – this. But Bethany is exhausted, and Mother is shell-shocked, and she doesn’t know Aveline well enough yet to voice her thoughts in front of her.

Gamlen lives in a ramshackle apartment in what he calls the Old City Slums; it smells of foundry smoke and beer and piss, and no-one can tell what comes from the tavern around the corner and what just comes from the inhabitants. The apartment has a main room with a hearth to cook on, a closet that seems to have a cot shoved in, and a very hastily cleaned bedroom which has a bunk bed and a sleeping pallet. Hawke realises that Gamlen gave up his bedroom for them, and scowls, wants to smack him around the ears for it. Now she owes him more. One more debt to keep track of. She thinks of the Chasind witch who helped them, how she could have passed for Hawke’s own grandmother, the same dark skin and hooked nose and thick lips, the same tattoos on her face. (The amulet doesn’t burn, doesn’t do anything but sit on her chest, but Hawke imagines it pulsing regardless.) Hawke is tired of debts.

Mother sleeps on the bottom bunk, while she and Bethany share the top. Aveline takes the sleeping pallet for the first few weeks, until she’s earned enough up on bonuses to move into a boarding house in Lowtown. Says she won’t owe their family more than she already does. Hawke moves to the pallet on the floor, moves it closer to the door so that any intruders will trip over her before they reach her family. She does push-ups in silence and pretends she doesn’t hear Mother and Bethany crying. It’s easy for her, to be a mercenary: she was a soldier for years, she knows how to fight, and she’s known how to follow orders since even before that. Bethany is soft, though, and when they return from missions – easy ones, try-outs, almost, test runs, Meeran calls them – Hawke puts her sister through exercises, trains her how to use her staff as a polearm, how to sharpen the blade at the end. She’s no mage, can’t train her in magic, but she stumbles her way through it regardless, forces her to do the meditative exercises their father used to do, even when Bethany doesn’t want to. It’s for her own good, she says. It’ll help ignore the hunger, she lies. Mother finds work in a washing house, and at the very least it caters only to merchants and not to the nobility, because Hawke doesn’t know if her mother would have been able to handle washing her former peers’ linens.

“Maybe in time I’ll be able to work with a tailor instead,” Mother mumbles to herself as she and Hawke bake bread one morning. Hawke grunts and punches the dough harder. It’s thin and bland, flour and water, but it’s food. Gamlen works the docks, and Hawke would be put in mind of her father, but he never spent his money on whores and drink and wallop games. Meeran doesn’t pay them, not her and Bethany, the sisters Hawke indentured soldiers, so when Gamlen mutters about rent and how feeding four is more than feeding one, she picks up shifts at the tavern around the corner, washing flagons long past dark. Once a month they go out to the Wounded Coast to pick elfroot and mushrooms, berries that Hawke recognises from growing down South and new ones that Mother points out are edible. Bethany helps the Red Iron’s alchemist mash them into poultices for change. Hawke encourages it, pushes Bethany to work, but pushes her towards jobs where she won’t have to get her hands too dirty, work that her little sister won’t find humiliating. Bethany Hawke is the daughter of a noblewoman and an apostate mercenary, a girl who grew up on a farm and did farm labour most of her life, but she still has – fancies. Odd hold-ups that she learned at Mother’s knee. Hawke shouldn’t indulge her, but their brother is dead. She doesn’t need any more rude awakenings.

Most members and allies of the Red Iron use codenames, or something like them: Worthy, Elegant, Tomwise. Adjectives seem to be the order of the day, but their surname fits well enough. They become Hawke-One and Hawke-Two, or Sword-Hawke and Mage-Hawke, or Hawke and Pretty-Hawke. The last one makes Bethany flush with anger, and Hawke breaks the catcaller’s toe. Gets a reaming for it from Meeran, but she takes his job and finishes it better, so they get off alright. It’s soldiers work. She’s used to it. Bethany’s hands shift, callouses from working a scythe alongside callouses from swinging a staff; she starts swearing like the other mercenaries do, and it’s funny to see her pretty little eighteen-year-old sister spit out oaths so strong that their mother blanches and Gamlen chokes on his ale. Hawke knows Bethany doesn’t like it, would prefer they be doing what she calls _honest work,_ but they can’t change how things are. Better to keep their heads down and work well. Bethany learns how to spit out fireball after fireball without fainting from magical exhaustion. Hawke learns how to fight so that she always has her sister covered. Life goes on.

“Carver would have hated it here,” Bethany says to her one night, when Mother is asleep.

“Don’t go there,” Hawke warns. She’s only just come back through the door; their uncle had promised her day work after one of the other workers threw out his back, and she’s spent the day hauling crates and listening to disgusting old men talk. Gamlen left her in Lowtown and went to the Blooming Rose to spend his pay immediately. Hawke grinds her teeth.

“You don’t get to just – ignore it happened,” Bethany says, rolls onto her side to look down at Hawke from the top bunk. It’s dark. Beth is crying. “He’s dead. You have to mourn. You can’t keep going on without thinking about it forever.”

“Watch me,” Hawke snaps. “Go to sleep. Meeran needs us tomorrow.”

Her sister grumbles and sniffles but settles down, and Hawke listens to her breathing, counts Bethany and Mother’s breaths, lets herself fall asleep to the unavoidable reminder that _they,_ at least, are still alive.

Meeran sends them out more and more as the months go on, starts handing out coin for bonuses, which Hawke isn’t complaining about. The sisters Hawke are making waves, though, which means on the one hand that they might find work easier when the year is out, but on the other, the risk of Templars coming after them grows. It’s a fucking riddle and Hawke never had the patience for those, never had the patience for much of anything that she can’t solve by charging at it and mowing it down. Mother worries. Bethany works herself into frenzies of panic that Hawke has to snap her out of, pushing her down and shoving her head between her knees and telling her to breathe, sitting back-to-back and moderating her breathing to be low and slow and long with nothing to do but wait for her little sister to copy her. Hawke works her hands to the bone, picking up extra work, taking extra missions for Meeran, helping with Mother’s workload when the grief takes her and she falls behind on her mending. Gamlen looks at her with something like respect, and Hawke wouldn’t say they get along, not when she has to yank his hair back and hold his head over a chamber pot when mead poisons his gut, not when she knows acutely how much coin he pisses away on bullshit, but he’s a grown man and it’s not her business. He took them in, she can take care of the rest. They don’t talk, he shares news of work on the dock when it’s there, and they scrape barnacles off merchant ships in silence. It works.

It’s a day when there’s no work to be had, when Meeran is quiet and the docks full, Elegant and Worthy and Tomwise ahead on their quotas and not needing an extra hand. Hawke is washing her sister’s hair.

“You’re eighteen. You could get tattoos,” she says, and Bethany pauses where she’s scrubbing at her forearm with a rough rag. Hawke knows she’s thinking of Carver, how he came back from Ostagar with his face still enflamed and red from his Chasind tattoos, carved into his face by a fellow tribesman before the battle. He died with his kind written defiant on his face for all to see.

“I don’t want to be recognisable, in case the Templars find us,” Bethany replies, and goes back to attacking her skin with their harsh lye soap. Hawke wants to buy her something softer, that smells nice, like the soap Elder Miriam used to make in Lothering that smelled of rosemary and citrus.

“It’s your heritage,” Hawke says bluntly, and pours a little more water over Bethany’s head, tries to untangle a knot. Beth’s hair isn’t kinked enough for the protective styles Hawke wears, the thick boxy braids and twists that their Father taught her to do, the curls more like loose waves, especially when they’re laden down with grease and blood and soot. Bethany can conjure water for baths more often than most in their position would be able to afford, but still. Hawke pulls the knot apart and smooths her sister’s hair down, takes soap to it again and scoops up more water.

Her hands are only ever gentle when she’s touching her mother or sister, it feels like.

“I don’t want it,” Beth says, and Hawke shrugs.

“Your choice.” Bethany is grown. She can make her own decisions about her face. It stings, somewhere, that fiercely protected part of her that Father nurtured and chastened in turn, the part that longs for community and got refused at every turn, told: all that matters is family, Maria. She knows that Bethany takes after Mother, that she believes in the Chant and the Andrastian Maker. She doesn’t like it, but it’s not her business.

“Do you think this is home?” Bethany asks then, still attacking her forearm, and Hawke reaches out to stop her, dunks the red irritated skin in the water.

“No,” Hawke replies. “But that doesn’t matter. We’re here.”

“And we can’t go back to Ferelden, with the Blight.”

“No.”

There’s a moment of quiet between the two of them, and then Bethany slumps, sinking deeper into the dirty water. “It’s shit, isn’t it.”

“Yeah.”

“Can you imagine if Mother had actually married the Comte de Launcet? We’d be nobility.”

That’s a word Hawke hears a lot, in this apartment. She’s tired of it.

“No use in thinking about that,” she says, and then hesitates when she sees Beth’s face fall. “You’d look nice in those fancy dresses,” she tacks on.

“Hah.” Bethany turns around, looks at Hawke. “Thanks for trying.”

“Welcome. Rinse your hair and get out.”

Bethany laughs and does so, sparks a heating spell to reheat the water so Hawke can take her turn.

“Work with Meeran tomorrow?” she asks, braiding her hair into an Orlesian plait, the way Mother taught her.

“Mhm.” Hawke has blood under her fingernails. She doesn’t know how long it’s been there. “Just another day in Kirkwall.”

“Just another day in Kirkwall,” Bethany agrees.

**Author's Note:**

> i've never proof-read anything a day in my life and i don't intend on starting now


End file.
